LinkedIn just unveiled its first ranking of full-time MBA programs, The 50 Best U.S. Business Schools to Grow Your Career, which uses data culled from the site itself. It includes only U.S.-based MBA programs, with at least 500 alumni, who graduated between 2018 to 2022. Its methodology is based on five pillars:
Hiring and Demand: Uses LinkedIn hiring and recruiter InMail data to track job placement rates for graduates and labor market demand
Ability to Advance: Uses standardized job titles to track promotions among recent cohorts, and the pace at which alumni reach director or VP-level leadership roles
Network Strength: Uses member connection data to track the average connections alumni have with individuals in director-level positions or above (network quality) and the network growth rate of recent cohorts before and after graduation (cohort connectivity)
Leadership Potential: Tracks percentage of alumni who take on entrepreneurial or C-suite roles post-graduation
Gender Diversity: Tracks gender parity within recent graduate cohorts
LinkedIn also provides some unique insights alongside its rankings, which include the most common industries, job titles, locations, and skills for each program based upon aggregated data collected from the LinkedIn profiles of alumni. The platform also allows the reader to click into each school to see who in their own network attended the school. Find the full ratings here.
Rank Business School
1 Harvard Business School
2 Stanford GSB
3 Dartmouth (Tuck)
4 Penn (Wharton)
5 MIT (Sloan)
6 Northwestern (Kellogg)
7 UC Berkeley (Haas)
8 Yale SOM
9 Chicago (Booth)
10 Duke (Fuqua)
11 Columbia Business School
12 Virginia (Darden)
13 UCLA (Anderson)
14 Cornell (Johnson)
15 Emory (Goizueta)
16 New York University (Stern)
17 Carnegie Mellon (Tepper)
18 Michigan (Ross)
19 USC (Marshall)
20 Texas (McCombs)
Not all stakeholders are impressed with LinkedIn’s initial effort. Poets & Quants called it a “Shrewd concept, botched execution.” Noting a lack of transparency in the methodology, P&Q calls out LinkedIn’s failure to provide index scores so that readers can understand how schools compare to each other. Also missing: an explanation for how the analysis weights the five pillars, or how the methodology accommodates for different class sizes (e.g., HBS graduates double the number of students in one five-year period compared to Michigan Ross). P&Q is also critical of the fact that, for an outcomes-based ranking, LinkedIn neglects metrics on salary or salary growth in its analysis. Read the full critique here.